But that spring when my son, the professor, and I arrived on the wrong weekend, it had rained and rained, so that Peter had held off trailing the cows to the ranch, hoping for better weather, until the moment had come when he had only maybe a day or two of feed left for them in the valley — that is, he was completely out of winter feed, and had no choice but to get them to the ranch as fast as possible, where there was both old and some new grass for them to eat. That meant rounding up a volunteer crew; chasing the cattle all in, not a very big job on only a section of land, sorting them — you wouldn’t, for example, put the cows in a packed trailer with their calves, as the calves might be trampled or otherwise hurt — and taking them load by load nearly forty miles southwest by road back onto the ranch. It was, as Peter would explain to visitors who exclaimed over so much land, in Canada merely a medium-size ranch, although as far as I know, in the mid-seventies it was, I think, the biggest one in the local area. To us, completely new to the terrain and way of life, the size wasn’t comprehensible. The ranch was nearly entirely native prairie, not flat land, as around Regina, the capital city, but low lazy hill after hill receding endlessly into the sky.
In later years, when all of this had been home to me for a long time, I sometimes used to take friends to the high highway that ran above the southern border of the ranch (with a few fields belonging to neighbours between the road we traveled east on and the south border), and drive slowly a couple of miles along it, urging my companions to look to the north.
“That is the ranch,” I would say softly, not even bothering to point, and there would be an awed silence, or a breathless ohhhh. I never stopped feeling that wonder myself: miles of blue-green, pale yellow, or snow-covered white hills extending as far as the eye could see, and beyond Peter’s land, all the way to the low horizon. It was like looking at a mythical, pre-contact Wyoming, a green Nunavut, a grassed Sahara. It put your heart up into your mouth.
My relationship to it was fragile, though, and that is why I never gazed at it comfortably as an owner does. I was Peter’s wife, my name went on the titles (eventually), but I had not discovered it, settled it, filled it with cattle, raised children on it, nor been a child raised on it, and in the face of all that, my mere title of “wife” wasn’t worth much to anybody. I would never be an equal to Peter or to any of his family members, although in the end I rivalled even his siblings in the number of years I was an “owner” there. Even his mother, who actually lived on the place from about 1934 on into the mid-sixties, when Peter’s father’s ill health drove his parents into town, put in the same number of years as I did. Of course, she lived on the ranch full-time for all those years while Peter and I, once we built the new house in the valley, lived there only sporadically, only summers, and otherwise when we were working there.
No, I cannot honestly say I ever felt like an owner of that place. I had the tenuous status of the daughter-in-law who comes from another family. In rural families, where everything is about land and land ownership, whoever marries the son has taken on rights she didn’t earn as the family members did. She doesn’t have a birthright as they do. She will never be fully a member of that family. In my years there, that would in the end stretch to thirty-three on the hay farm and partly on the ranch, I never felt a rock-solid sense that I had a right to be there, that the place was mine too. And yet, it was my home; I had no other home.
I had some trouble seeing this at the time, although now, from my new perspective in the city, it is perfectly clear. How hard it must be for the women of any land-owning family who will not inherit land and will have to leave, often for the city or town or for some other family’s land, to see their birthright become another woman’s. Until the time comes when the old British system of the land going to the eldest son as a way of keeping wealth together is deposed so that each child regardless of gender receives an equal share, this burden will continue for the women of most rural agricultural land-holding families.
That weekend when I first saw the place, I rode with Peter in his rattling old four-ton truck loaded with cattle all the way to the ranch, which he always referred to as being forty miles from the hay farm, and by which he meant house to house; watched him back up to the sloped dirt loading ramp, the earth held in place with stout vertical planks, and let the cattle out; watched them disperse before he put the truck back into gear and we headed back to the hay farm to get another load. I knew he was happy; on the way back to the hay farm he didn’t brake going down the hills as he would always do otherwise, especially in a vehicle like that one — big and rickety — but let us sail down them as if we were flying. I sensed that buoyancy was what he felt in his heart that day. I remembered that the first time we had seen each other in the city his eyes, a light blue, had darkened and taken on a glitter as he gazed at me, a look that would have frightened me in a stranger. Being a girl of a certain era, I saw it for what it was; I tossed my head like a beauty queen. This was months before I saw him again, when my son, the professor, and I drove south and found him in the midst of rounding up and trucking cattle from hay farm to ranch.
I have written in my 1994 memoir, The Perfection of the Morning: An Apprenticeship in Nature, what I felt when I first saw the land of the southwest opening before me; I’d come from a city and from a university community where we didn’t look up into the sky much unless we were astronomers or studying the aurora borealis (as my first love back in 1958 had done). Mostly we looked at each other and at street signs and buildings; we strode hallways and classrooms, rarely the wilderness. We thought, like so many people, that if you hadn’t hiked the Himalayas and you hadn’t trekked through the Nahanni or the Serengeti, you hadn’t seen nature, as if nature were some very rare commodity, available only to the most daring and wealthiest.
Bookstores were beginning to fill with books about where nature was (across the ocean, at the top of mountains, in the midst of vast deserts, in the jungles of hot continents), with the how-tos containing practical suggestions for finding potable water, crossing a bridgeless river, greeting strange new tribes. There were exciting and/or ecstatic memoirs of such trips. Before too many years had passed, I began to wonder if humankind had lost its mind. Wasn’t the ant crawling along the house foundation nature? Wasn’t the vegetable garden in the backyard? Wasn’t the uncut field? Even what lived at the garbage dump? The foxes, badgers, and skunks that ran in the ditches along the roads, the insects and mice in the cracks in the sidewalks, the birds perched on high ledges and rooflines, the clever raccoons rummaging in urban garbage cans, and the coyotes stalking small dogs in suburban yards?
There began to be, in those early years, a growing interest in the spiritual in nature, and also in the knowledge of such matters that Aboriginal people held — the elders in particular. Carlos Castaneda was in full flight, read with held breath by millions, me included, and to this day no one is sure if he was purely a charlatan or a true visionary — perhaps he was a little of both. The North American world, after generations of building cities and touting them — fully believing in them — as the best solution to the ills of humankind, now was beginning to yearn for the more natural world that had been lost through the industrial revolution, through fossil-fueled industries and transportation modes, and in the ranks of shining city towers, the rubble-strewn ghettos, the regimented, too-tidy, clock-driven suburban world.
That was the very time I found Peter and the ranch.
Indeed, the chief gift of my new life turned out to be living in nature: Peter and I lying in bed on a summer night with all the windows open and hearing the hissing snarl only feet away of a passing bobcat, or maybe it was a lynx, or even a cougar, and then, as we froze and listened hard, hearing not another sound; at the hay farm Peter calling me softly to come and watch a small herd of elk appear against the skyline on the hills to the south as we stood at the door of the old log house gazing up, not moving; lying on our stomachs in the tall grass on a bank above a slough to see the wild swans on their migration north
gliding back and forth on the dark water; hearing the first V of geese in the spring circling from the east or the west, honking, looking for water and feed, flying so low over us that we could hear the powerful beat of their wings as they captured air and pushed it away. It did something to you, as if your heart weren’t in your chest anymore but was rising into the air with those great birds. More than once there were pelicans, it seemed to me the most skittish of the great birds, at least when they were in our country, and sometimes, rarely, a moose that had strayed too far south, and at the ranch there were always antelope skimming the hills in the distance, flowing in pale, dreamlike bunches over the fields. Deer were there, both mule and white tail, every morning and every evening. And coyotes, the most interested in humans, their signature songs background to the rising and setting of the sun. I got used to seeing golden eagles, hawks were everywhere, and in the spring or fall a lone bald eagle or a pair of them might pass by or roost in our trees for a day or so, or blue herons came, flapping their great wings in a leisurely, half-clumsy fashion, as if they had all the time in the world, and were lords of everything they saw. In winter, snowy owls, so eerie and beautiful, so purely white that they startled you as they suddenly rose up off a fence post as you passed by down the snow-covered trail.
It seemed a miracle to me that I had been fortunate enough to have found this nature-driven world to escape to.
4
A Map of the World
Having married Peter, I came to the southwest as a wife in the spring of 1976. The world I moved into was purely rural and nearly completely agricultural. This was long before the social mobility of thoroughly urban people who, believing in the possibility of some pastoral idyll, and often retired or prosperous enough not to need jobs, began to move in surprisingly large numbers to remote rural villages and towns where a liveable house was breathtakingly cheap and the cost of living much lower. An urban person in the community then was a rarity, aside from the current local doctor, maybe, or some of the teachers. I had not lived in such an environment since the day we left the last small town for the metropolis of Saskatoon when I was thirteen, and although both my parents came from farms, and I had visited my grandparents on their farm, I had never lived on one. In contrast, Peter had spent part of two winters in Saskatoon at agricultural school when he was about sixteen and seventeen, living in a dorm with a lot of other rural boys, and that was the sum total of his experience of urban life. As his mother once said of herself and her family, “We are as rural as you can be. Nobody is more rural than we are.”
The whole area was more rural than it is today, and a good deal more insular, with little population drift in or out, except, as Peter told me, usually the “best” having left because there has been nowhere to go here, no way to get ahead visibly and quickly, farming being too slow and always uncertain. Others said, “Anybody with any get-up-and-go got up and went,” but I always found that interesting, because the speaker, not a failure, had stayed and didn’t seem rancorous about it. So I felt they must have meant a particular personality type, someone eager for a faster-paced, more exciting, more peopled world, and with more sure money, maybe even a little glamour. It would be explained to me that in families where one person left for the city, that person always did better financially through his life than had the siblings who stayed behind to work at jobs in the villages or out on the land as farmers or ranchers. Young men might find it necessary for a few years to go off north to work in construction or in the oil fields or as ranch hands on one of the storied ranches in British Columbia, while they waited to take over the family land, but the younger generation rarely went away to get a higher education then. And a girl who didn’t marry a local boy soon went away, and usually didn’t come back, having no land to come back to.
There was thus a kind of purity about the place and the people in those days, whose culture depended utterly on land ownership, the handling of cattle herds, riding and managing horses, looking after grazing fields and farms with their crops to be marketed, with the weather and the seasons (then both perfectly predictable) and everyone knowing everyone else or related to one another. Everything was ordained by the land itself, and the community was a tight network of intense relationships. Here the best possible thing a woman could be was a nurse. A nurse was respected in that physical society because she knew what to do if someone lost an arm in a baler, or rolled a truck, or smashed a leg under a horse out in the field or at the rodeo, or if a baby ran a high fever, or a child got hit on the head and wouldn’t wake up. This, of course, was because either there was no doctor at all nearby, or in the earliest days he might well be a little mad, an incompetent, an alcoholic or drug addict, or on the run from a bad mistake elsewhere, or else (if not both) trying to serve offices in a couple of villages and thus overly busy, and hard to catch up with. Not to mention the bad roads and the paucity or complete absence of ambulances. My college education, then, was fairly useless.
So I spent the first year almost constantly with Peter, in the field, in small towns waiting while he got parts, at elevators, in the café, on horseback, in the corrals, in cattle buyers’ offices or at the sale ring, or crossing the land in a truck. Now and then, when there was a long stretch between holidays or long weekends, and I was missing Sean too much, I would drive to the city to see him, staying with my widowed mother and spending whatever time with him we could manage between his soccer games or his swim meets or other activities in his busy teenager’s life. Often I would drive to the city to bring him “home” for a long weekend or Christmas or Easter vacations. Then we would have five hours together each way without anyone else, and our bond, never broken but sometimes stretched thinner through absence than I would have wished, would be renewed. And yet, although I wrestled with the worry every day, I couldn’t bring myself to give up my marriage. How many women have gone through this pain? How many women never get over their guilt? I can say, however, that as might be expected, it got easier for both of us as Sean grew older and more independent.
By my new marriage, though, I had entered what was then in Saskatchewan the magical kingdom of the farm from which both of my parents had been displaced. I was learning also that I was a woman living within the great myth of the cowboy West. Both of these fascinated me, and I wanted to know all about them. But the second couldn’t be asked about, could only be observed and considered. About the first, I never stopped asking questions, and Peter got great pleasure out of teaching me. Once we even took a cattle oiler apart: We sat on the truck’s tailgate, parked out in a field miles from anywhere, and as the oiler has two arms, he took one of them apart piece by piece and I sat beside him imitating each step with the second arm. I don’t remember what the problem was, but I know we fixed it. I felt immeasurably competent after that. I went with him in the half-ton to chase the horses into the corrals, a rough, exciting ride that was better than anything at the fair, and in the winter more than once on his dilapidated snowmobile when the road into the ranch was closed by snow and we had to get in to feed and check the horses and make sure that the house was all right. When the horses were elsewhere or in use or we were in a hurry, I rode with him on his motorcycle to check fields and cattle. I was often in the cab with him while he cut hay or baled it. When he moved loads from one place to another, I followed him in the truck. During this early period he was teaching me about the business of ranching, the daily chores, the seasonal rounds, the weather, the earth, the grass, the habits of horses and cattle, even of the wild animals and birds of the fields. I started to understand that the birds and the animals were the rural person’s daily newspaper: the weather report, the news of seasonal changes, or news alerts when something went wrong.
The day finally arrived when Peter came from where he had been tinkering in the shop to the house to tell me he was going somewhere on an errand, assuming I would get my jacket and go with him, and I, thinking it was time I tried to map a world of my own as well as the one we had together, said, “Thanks, but I
think I’ll stay here this time.” He was surprised, but if he was disappointed, he didn’t show it. I think I just spoke first, that he was already thinking this way of operating, unusual as it was, couldn’t go on forever.
That was when my wanderings began. That was when I began to explore my new environment, by myself, without Peter there to lead, show, and interpret. Like most twentieth-century North American adults, I’d spent most of my days indoors. The last office at the university I’d shared with one or two others had painted concrete-block walls and not even a window; to be free to go outside and sit or walk, staying as long as was agreeable, was then a small miracle to me, and I used that freedom to get to know my new home. Every day now I would go out into the fields on foot, choosing a direction I hadn’t been before and where there were no cattle.
The Butalas owned both the ranch and the hay farm, which, as I have noted, were about forty miles apart. They had bought the hay farm in 1949 because they could not grow enough hay on the ranch itself because the climate was too dry, and relying on purchased hay was risky — there would be years when scarcity made it impossible to buy — and too expensive. The cattle were mostly kept at the ranch, where they wandered the 13,000 acres, grazing and giving birth to their calves and nurturing them. When the worst of winter came, Peter, his family, and fellow ranchers or hired cowboys trailed the herd north and east to the hay farm, where there was shelter in the valley hills and water for them to drink in the river, and where the winter’s supply of feed for them was grown, harvested, and stored in bales. When spring came, the herd was trailed back to the ranch. It was such a commonplace annual routine that about the time of the winter move, already the few oldest cows would be waiting patiently at the northeast gate, ready and eager to get to the shelter of the “valley place,” which was the hay farm. Thus, we spent part of each year in each place and, once we built the new modern house on the hay farm, often drove back and forth each day. As well, each summer we spent a few weeks in the valley while Peter did the haying, although the cattle remained to graze at the ranch.
Where I Live Now Page 6